refuting common wisdom on scales everybody knows

[Xietor]

Order 3 does not block the effects of luck indefinitely.

It depends on how much you need the luck in the early game. In time, even with 3 order, you get 3 lucky events a turn.
The better your expansion, the sooner you hit the max lucky events even with order 3.

Order 3 does block the luck effects in the early game, but luck3 does double the chance of a worthy hero every turn starting on turn 1, and if you happen to be playing with worthy heroes that can be worth something.

In alpaca that was the only mod used, and i Luckily got the harpy queen and access to air magic on turn 3 or 4. And likely in year 2 i was getting a steady diet of diverse gems
that Pangaea normally does not get. Before my 1st war was over, I had 3 of the worthy heroes.

[Baalz]

Well, let me lay out an example to illustrate my point. I'll stick with C'tis since I started with Sauromancers...

MA C'tis is a nation many people would immediately take order/sloth with as they've got several good low resource troops. Expanding with groups something like 15 city guards and 30 slave warriors at a cost of 510 gold + 190 resources. Compare to production/turmoil expanding with something like 20 swamp guards (17 protection + falchion) for 260 gold + 420 resources. The swamp guards are going to take significantly less attrition against most indies as well. Who has better cash flow?

I think maybe the sticking point here is that you guys are arguing: "ok, so production can be a good idea, but you'd be much better in these situations going with production AND order!". Ok, again, I've got to say there's the opportunity cost, what are you giving up? Sure, it's best to take order, production, an awake pretender, a positive magic scale and the kitchen sink as well. Do you take the extra gold from order at the expense of losing some magic diversity? At the cost of slowing down your initial expansion and putting yourself more at risk of a rush? At the cost of slowing down your research? Suck the points our of luck, of course - though I think I've made a point that that's not a no-brainer. There is a cost, and IMO its not always better to take order.

[quantum_mechani]

Baalz said:


I think maybe the sticking point here is that you guys are arguing: "ok, so production can be a good idea, but you'd be much better in these situations going with production AND order!". Ok, again, I've got to say there's the opportunity cost, what are you giving up? Sure, it's best to take order, production, an awake pretender, a positive magic scale and the kitchen sink as well. Do you take the extra gold from order at the expense of losing some magic diversity? At the cost of slowing down your initial expansion and putting yourself more at risk of a rush? At the cost of slowing down your research? Suck the points our of luck, of course - though I think I've made a point that that's not a no-brainer. There is a cost, and IMO its not always better to take order.

That is indeed the sticking point - I have never argued that there are not uses for prod. As I said before, there is a degree of diminishing returns as you spend point on expanding faster, just based on logistics (not to mention being spread thin). What this means, is that you generally do not need to mine order while more or less optimizing your expansion. And unlike factors like expanding pretender + bless, order does not add but multiply your gold advantage.

There is no denying by putting points in order you are not putting points elsewhere, and many of these other spending options are by their nature difficult to quantify in value. Given that, I can only say that in order's indispensability is based on it's universal applicability. Magic scale, blesses, prod scale, etc are not generally critical components all at the same time. And even if they were, you don't have enough gold to make the best use of them... unless perhaps you have order.